Writing about the stars

Having just finished a novel about astronomers and the stars – Variable Stars, to be published next month – I thought I’d see what else had been written on the subject. Some of this I’d come across already, in the line of research – although as a rule I try not to read anything too recent, when I’m working on a book. A quick trawl through some of the many internet sites devoted to astronomy and its influence on literature, turned up a wealth of material – so much, in fact, that I began to wonder if there were any poets (for they were mainly poets) who hadn’t written at least one poem about the stars. As well as the usual suspects – Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and the rest of the Romantic crew – there were wonderful poems by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and a great many others, some of whom I’d never come across before, but whose writings on the heavens made me avid to read more.

It soon became apparent that one could fill several volumes with writing about the stars – and that’s even before you get to the present day. Recent developments in astrophysics have given rise to poems with titles such as The Event Horizon (by Greg Delanty) and Prothalamion of Quantum Mechanics and Astrophysics (by Alan Dugan) – both collected in a recent anthology, Dark Matter. Contemporary poets such as Seamus Heaney, John Kinsella, Miroslav Holub and James Fenton, to name but a few, have written – wonderfully – about a whole range of cosmological ideas. There isn’t space – or indeed time – to quote them all.

With such riches at my disposal, I decided that selectiveness was the only answer. The stars are just too vast a subject. A vast number of people have written about them. You can’t hope to include them all. And so here is my personal selection, of the myriad poems the past few centuries have thrown up, on the stars and planets, and our relationship with them. I’ve tried to be roughly chronological – if only because Time is so important to astronomers – but otherwise these have been chosen because they convey something to me of the beauty, strangeness, and infinite variety of the universe in which we live.

I’ve always loved the beautiful lines towards the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, when Troilus’s ghost, having ascended ‘up to the holughnesse of the eighthe spere’, looks down on the world he has just left – an image which anticipates the famous NASA photographs of the earth taken from space of the late 1960s and afterwards:

And down from thennes fast he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe, that with the se
Embraced is…

Chaucer, who published a treatise on the astrolabe, was of course fascinated by astronomy, and his works reflect the late medieval world-view that human destiny was to a large extent controlled by the stars and planetary movements. By the time one gets to Shakespeare, this fatalistic idea has given way to a more rationalist view, as expressed in Sonnet 14;

Not from the stars do I my judgement plucke,
And yet me thinkes I have Astronomy,
But not to tell of good, or evil lucke,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons quality,
Nor can I fortune to breefe mynuits tell;
Pointing to each his thunder, raine and winde,
Or say with Princes if it shal go wel
By oft predict that I in heaven finde.
But from thine eies my knowledge I derive,
And constant stars in them I read such art
As truth and beautie shal together thrive
If from thy selfe, to store thou wouldst convert:
Or else of thee this I prognosticate,
Thy end is Truthes and Beauties doome and date.

Shakespeare’s plays, of course, contain more references to stars and planets than you can shake a stick at. These are a few of my favourites:

…Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires…

Macbeth, I, iv

…this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours…

Hamlet, II, ii

…Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins…

The Merchant of Venice, V, I

This beautiful sonnet from Astrophel and Stella, by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Sir Philip Sidney, is another favourite – and one I was able to quote in Variable Stars:

With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What! May it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case:
I read it in thy looks; thy languished grace…

No anthology – however partial – of poems about the stars and planets would be complete without at least a few lines from Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels, in which one presumes the virginal ‘Cynthia’ is a not-too-thinly disguised Queen Bess:

Queen and huntress, chaste, and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,,
Seated, in thy silver chair,
State in wonted manner keep.
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess, excellently bright…

Love and the stars are intimately entwined in the literature of this period – whether it is the blissful state of Belmont’s Jessica and Lorenzo which is being described, or the jealous agonies of the lover in Thomas Campion’s Follow Thy Fair Sun:

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow ;
Though thou be black as night,
And she made all of light,
Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow…

Or those of John Donne:

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind…

Donne is in more forgiving mood in A Valediction: of Weeping, describing the moment of parting, and incorporating one of the many astronomical images to be found throughout his poetry:

O more than Moone,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy spheare,
Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbeare
To teach the sea, what it may do too soone…

Another poet with more than his fair share of astronomical citations is John Milton – although, given the length of the work, a short-ish extract from Book 3 of Paradise Lost, describing Satan’s flight across the universe towards the Sun, will have to suffice:

…and without longer pause
Down right into the world’s first region throws
His flight precipitant, and winds with ease
Through the pure marble air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable stars, that shone
Stars distant, but nigh hand seemed other worlds,
Or other worlds they seemed, or happy isles,
Like those Hesperian gardens famed of old,
Fortunate fields, and groves and flow’ry vales,
Thrice happy isles, but who dwelt happy there
He stayed not to inquire: above them all
The golden sun in splendor likest Heaven
Allured his eye…

Moving swiftly on to the eighteenth century, one finds these lines describing a comet, from Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, which, again, I was glad to be able to quote in Variable Stars, and which beautifully capture the fiery ‘tresses’ of the comet:

A sudden Star, it shot thro’ liquid Air,
And drew behind a radiant Trail of Hair.
Not Berenice’s Locks first rose so bright,
The Heav’ns bespangling with dishevel’d Light…

The innovations in astronomy that were taking place throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – culminating in William Herschel’s discovery of a new planet, Uranus, in 1781 – were a striking influence on the poetry of the period. Here, writing several decades after Herschel’s discovery, but clearly referring to it, is John Keats:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne ;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold :
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken ;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific -— and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Byron wasn’t going to be left out, either. Here he is in apocalyptic mood:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d and the stars
Did wander darkling in eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air…

This is Shelley, addressing the moon (it’s funny how often poets address the moon; perhaps its resemblance to a face should not be underestimated):

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

I could go on, and on… Because I haven’t even reached the twentieth century (to say nothing of the mid-to-late-nineteenth). Tennyson, Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hardy and Houseman have yet to reveal their poetical/astronomical treasures, and I’d hoped to put in some Auden (very good on the stars) and maybe a bit of Eliot. But this post has gone on quite long enough. ‘Had we but world enough and time…’ as another poet once remarked. The answer is, we don’t. But I can’t think of a better way of spending it, than reading this magical verse.